Sealed
Page 17
‘I’m not going to be gone long,’ she says. ‘We’ll need to pack-up a few things. Then we’ll come back in the car and I’ll help you. There won’t be much space, but,’ she says, ‘so it’ll have to be essentials. One bag, right? That’s what I’ll tell Paulie. And we need to move fast. Listen, just don’t worry. You stay here, don’t you move. We’ll come back, I’ll sort things out, and we’ll go together. I’m coming back for you, mate, and for this little one.’
And then she’s gone, before I can say, Don’t leave me. For Chrisake, don’t leave me alone with the baby. I don’t know how to love her. I don’t know how to be that hopeful.
* * *
The baby’s in my arms, so I cradle her again for a while, like Mara did. I think of Pete and I make myself look at her again. Her breath is fast and uneven, and her whole body palpitates on the turn of each little gasp. But she’s doing it: this tiny thing is trying to live. The sky is beginning to turn to gold outside. The sun must be setting and I want to leave this scene behind: the blood-jelly and the knife and the empty bottle. It’s hard to get up. I put the baby down and I manage it on the fourth attempt. I have to walk in a new way, moving real slow. I pick the baby up and I take her out to the edge of the porch. The sky over the mountains is a pink blaze. I think I can smell fire on the air. Perhaps it’s my imagination? It’s definitely your imagination, babe, Pete would say.
This is what won’t happen: Pete won’t put his arm around me and touch the baby’s cheek with his fingertips. He won’t tell me that he’s going to take care of us. He won’t look at the baby’s tiny, curled fingers with so much fear for her that it makes his heart thump in his chest and in his throat, with so much fear that it makes him feel more alive and closer to death than he’s ever been. And my mother will not hold the baby, or kiss her furrowed forehead, or tell her, when she’s older and harder, pushing her dark hair out of her eyes, that even though it hurts her sometimes, she’s proud of her fierceness. My mother will never sing hymns to us, or read to us, or name plants in her garden with us. And my mother will never hold me, and be pushed away, and still try to hold me again.
It’s then that I hear the first one go: I hear a soft thud, like ripe fruit falling to the ground. My mother used to say that I was left under a mulberry bush, born as cleanly as a pear. But that was a lie. No one’s born clean, I know that now. Everyone’s born out of blood and fire. There’s another little thud. And, a few moments later, another. This time I see something drop from the tree at the end of the garden. I hold the baby tight to my chest and I walk slowly to the edge of the border. I wait a moment, but there’s no sound. I peer at the soil at the foot of the tree, and then I see it: a tiny little bird, a baby bird, fallen from a nest, and another baby bird just a few feet away from it. One of them is twitching on its side, its little legs scrabbling at nothing. The other is perfectly still. And I know before I look at them closely what it is that I will see; that their eyes will be fused, the grey skin sealing them into darkness. I stare out across the valley, where no lights glimmer now, and I see the full panorama: the pink sky above the mountains is hazing into purple as smoke rises in the distance. Behind the mountains everything is burning. The world is on fire behind the mountains. And I know that the forest won’t protect us. The forest doesn’t want us here, filthying up the air and the water and the soil. The forest knows what we’ve done to this land: it’s watched us steal it and mine it and run poison into its seams. The forest wants rid of us.
Behind me, another thud, heavier this time: an adult bird, blurred into blackness, hitting the side of the house and fitting on the ground. Another bird falls from the tree in front of me. And then it begins in earnest: the mewling and distant screeching and cawing, as the animals, concealed all around me, begin to be sealed in to their hiding places – suffocated in the undergrowth, deep in the earth, in their burrows in the roots of the trees – as they start to spin and scream and claw in blind, hopeless fear of their own skin.
I turn away from the mountains. Mara’s at the gate. She’s standing very still, listening to the animal noises rising all around us. The sky above her is deep and lustrous as melted bronze, a sky-mirror full of fire. Mara puts her hands up to her ears, digs her fingers into her scalp. And then she shakes her head hard and she’s through the gate, running towards me. ‘Alice! We’ve got to go,’ she shouts, and catches my arm hard, ‘Iluka and Paulie are in the car and we’re going, right now, right now, all of us are going.’
I gather the baby hard into my chest, and the fire on the air is on my tongue and in my belly now too. I am part of this; me and Mara and Iluka and Paulie, and my mother, and Pete too – Pete too – and all of our dead who we carry with us, and the baby, this baby in my arms who only wants to live, we’re all under this burning sky together and we can’t stay safe, there is no safe. The baby moves her face against my chest, opening her little red mouth up to the world and asking it to feed her. I’m beginning to feel warm and alive again. I’ll go with Mara. We’ll go together, and I’ll take care of her, I’ll take care of this tiny creature curled in my chest. I will not let us be sealed in. I’ve fought through my own skin and I’ll carry on fighting, tooth and bloody claw, until I find a way to have hope. Until I find a way to love her.
‘C’mon,’ says Mara. ‘You’ll have to leave everything. We’re going now.’
And as we move together, me and the baby and Mara, the world is new to me again, a great burning ball of fire and pain and hope.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Naomi Booth is a fiction writer and academic. Her novella, The Lost Art of Sinking, emerged from research into the literary history of swooning, and won the Saboteur Award for Best Novella 2016 as well as being selected for New Writing North’s Read Regional campaign 2017. Her first novel, Sealed, is a gripping modern fable on motherhood. She is currently working on a new novel and collection of short stories, and an academic monograph on passing out.
In 2018 Naomi was named in the Guardian’s ‘Fresh Voices: 50 Writers to Read Now’. She was also picked for the ‘Not the Booker’ shortlist and was long-listed for the Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award.
Naomi grew up in West Yorkshire, UK, and now lives in York. She lectures in Creative Writing and Literature.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Enormous thanks go to Nathan Connolly and Amelia Collingwood at Dead Ink Books, Lucia Walker, Emma Bailey and Sabhbh Curran at Curtis Brown, and Gary Budden and Davi Lancett at Titan Books, for their enthusiasm and work on this book. Thank you, also, to all of the readers who first supported this project through Dead Ink and made this book a reality.
Michael Fake—who initially told me this story was too horrible to write, thereby inspiring me to continue it—also provided support of a more conventional and indispensable nature: thank you. I am grateful to early readers who had to pick through some chaotic gore, in particular: James Booth, Abi Curtis, Oliver Morgan, Sameer Rahim and Toby Smart. Special thanks for brilliant writing advice and encouragement go to Tom Bunstead, Camilla Bostock, Kieran Devaney, Dulcie Few, Laura Joyce, Helen Jukes and Tom Houlton. For their long-standing support, I am grateful to Tom Chivers, Nasser Hussain, Kate Murray-Browne, Sophie Nicholls, Nicholas Royle and JT Welsch. I am also thankful for continuing conversations with my colleagues and students at York St John University.
Thank you to my parents, Jane and Ian Booth, who helped me to find time to finish off the writing after the birth of my daughter and who continue to support me even when my work is too disgusting for them to read. I am lucky to count many generous and talented women as friends, and they inspire everything I do: thank you Kechi Ajuonuma, Janine Bradbury, Clare Brook, Lena Graff, Rebecca Hawkins, Sophie Hamza, Tricia Mundy, Katy O’Neill, Emma Phillips, Lucy Rice, Poppy Templeton and Ruby Templeton. To the fiercest and most tenacious girl I know, Betty Fake, thank you for teaching me about the importance of hopefulness.
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